An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2004.htm
I read the first several entries, quite as if I had all the time I needed for pleasure reading, ignoring the reality of the vacuum sitting outside my bedroom door like a plaintive, heart-weary suitor, begging me to make good use of it before shoving it back into the closet like a cast off, mateless glove.
“Fie,” I said to the vacuum, in a manner as callous as the skin on my heels, although it was I who was more heel than the unfortunate and ill-used cleaning apparatus. “I have no more interest in you than I have time to read the remaining entries. Just as I get back to them later, you, no doubt, will still be darkening my doorstep, waiting for me to fall over you in an ill-considered mid-night perambulation.”
Choke!..gag!..cough…Ummm, that was really…um… good Em!:really:
HeySue